Possible improvements to portage

[syadnom]

i have some ideas to improve portage for use in some "multiple gentoo" shops(as in more than one gentoo machine)

portage is great, first of all, but can it do a cascading search through a local directory BEFORE it goes to a portage server?

id like the ability to rsync on one machine(the server most likely), then :
emerge -f foo001.1 otherfoo2.4 kdefoo samba gnome dillo etc etc

say my server is 192.168.254.1 for instance.

then on all of the gentoo boxes i could type something along the lines of :
emerge rsync -local 192.168.254.1
and it would match rsync to the server, then i could:

emerge -local 192.168.254.1 foo001.1 otherfoo2.4 kdefoo samba gnome dillo etc etc

and emerge would fetch from there saving my internet bandwidth.

maybee this isnt the best example of what im looking for but i think it gets the point accross. to minimize use of an internet connection/improve speed of updateing and installing new packages.

just something to thing about ,
syadnom,
grand pubah of the local gentoo tribe

[alec]

I've got two computers running Gentoo on my local LAN. What I've done is created an rsync server on one of them and alteredy my make.conf on the other. To cut down on downloads, whenever I rsync I make sure to 'emerge -fu world' (always thought that command was sorta funny...). This downloads all the files that would be updated on that computer. I change the rsync in my /etc/make.conf to point to that computer and as it is syncing it grabs not only the portage tree but all the files that have been downloaded in the distfiles directory. This works transparently, and if I set up other computers on my network I'm going to be sure to point their rsyncs to one machine as opposed to the main Gentoo server.

Alternatively, you can set up one of the computers with Apache and point a subdirectory to a specific folder on your hard disk that you store your files in, or perhaps just your /usr/portage/distfiles directory. Then, in your /etc/make.conf, edit your gentoo mirrors variable to point to that local URL in addition to the ibiblio site and any others you might have.